Amal Hussein (Engineering Manager at npm) joined the show to talk about AST’s — aka, abstract syntax trees. Amal is giving a talk at All Things Open on the subject so we asked her to give us an early preview. She’s on a mission to democratize the knowledge and usage of AST’s to push legacy code and the web forward.

In this very special fully-connected episode of Practical AI, Daniel interviews Chris. They discuss High Performance Computing (HPC) and how it is colliding with the world of AI. Chris explains how HPC differs from cloud/on-prem infrastructure, and he highlights some of the challenges of an HPC-based AI strategy.

Dave Kaplan (Head of Software Engineering at Policygenius) joined the show to talk about Generative Engineering Cultures and how they have become the goal of industry-aware tech teams. We talk through the topology of organizational cultures ranging from pathological, to bureaucratic, to generative, the importance of management buy-in (from the top down) on leading a generative culture, the ability to contribute original value which is deeply rooted in the concept of aligned autonomy. We also covered the 6 core skills required for us to be empowered in our teams.

KBall, Divya, Feross, and Jerod get together to discuss tips and tricks for communicating with other coders, project stakeholders, and users.

Mat, Johnny, Jon, and special guest Ian Lance Taylor discuss generics in Go. What are generics and why are they useful? Why aren’t interfaces enough? How will the standard library change if generics are added to Go? How has the community contributed to generics? If generics are added, how will this negatively affect the language?

We’re talking with Sherol Chen, a machine learning developer, about AI at Google and AutoML methods. Sherol explains how the various AI groups within Google work together and how AutoML fits into that puzzle. She also explains how to get started with AutoML step-by-step (this is “practical” AI after all).

This episode is all about conferences and there is a lot to talk about! Why even go? What makes a conference worth it? How can you get the most of the experience? Is speaking worth all the effort? How can you make your talk amazing? How can you get your talk selected? We chime in on all of these questions plus more.

Abhinav Asthana (founder of Postman) joined the show to talk about Postman, an ADE — API Development Environment — that began as open source and is now a full-fledged company that just announced a $50 million dollar Series B. We talk about why Postman has grown so successfully, APIs and their impact to core business factors, what it means to be an API Development Environment (ADE), and how they created one of the most popular API platforms and community.

LIVE from LondonGophers as part of GopherCon UK! Mat Ryer, and Mark Bates were joined by Liz Rice, Kat Zień, Gautam Rege to talk about the magic in Go’s standard library. Huge thanks to the organizers of LondonGophers and GopherCon UK for making this possible.

Johnny, Mat, Jaana, and special guest Stevenson Jean-Pierre discuss serverless in a Go world. What is serverless, what use cases is serverless good for, what are the trade offs, and how do you program with Go differently in the context of serverless?

With the jumping off point of KBall’s question: “What are best practices for organizing a Node project?” Mikeal and Feross drop an incredible amount of wisdom about Node, organizing using modules, release management, deployment approaches, how to adopt change, and more.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100’s of open source projects which have been downloaded 100’s of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek of CodeNewbie, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It’s an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

David Yakobovitch joins the show to talk about the evolution of data science tools and techniques, the work he’s doing to teach these things at Galvanize, what his HumAIn Podcast is all about, and more.

KBall, Divya, and Chris talk about what’s going on in all the big frontend frameworks, share some pro tips, and shout out awesome people and things in the community.

We’re on the expo hall floor of OSCON 2019 talking with Eric Holscher, Ali Spittel, and Hong Phuc Dang. First up, we talk to Eric about his work at Write the Docs, ethical advertising, and the Pac-Man rule at conferences. Second, we talk with Ali about her passion for teaching developers, her passion for writing, and her new found love for podcasting. Last, we talk with Hong about her work at FOSSASIA, the disconnect between America and Asia in open source, and several of the cool open source projects they have on GitHub.

Mireille and Adam explore the importance of relationships and the concept of attachment. We often think of ourselves as individuals, but our lives are spent embedded within the context of social relationships. These relationships influence and shape our brains, which deeply influences who we are.

Hot off the heels of GopherCon 2019 — Johnny Boursiquot, Jon Calhoun, and special guests Jamal Yusuf, and Yingrong Zhao recap the conference and the importance of representation in the Go community.

Adam adds a twist to our YepNope format this week. Instead of 2v2, it’s 1v1v1 with Mikeal reppin’ team Yep, Divya on team Nope, and Feross sitting in the middle on team It Depends. You don’t want to miss this excellent debate/discussion all about JS tooling complexity.

Many packages
New frameworks built all the time
Config hell. Webpack

Ryan Singer, head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, joined the show to talk about their newest book — Shape Up: Stop running in circles and ship work that matters. It’s written by Ryan himself and you can read it right now for free online at Basecamp.com/shapeup.

We talked about the back story of the book, how the methodology for Shape Up developed from within at Basecamp, the principles and methodologies of Shape Up, how teams of varying sizes can implement Shape Up. Ryan even shared a special invitation to our listeners near the end of the show to his live and in-person Shape Up workshop on August 28th in Detroit, Michigan.

Redis is a an open source, in-memory data structure store, widely used as a database, cache and message broker. It now also support tensor data types and deep learning models via the RedisAI module. Why did they build this module? Who is or should be using it? We discuss this and much more with Pieter Cailliau.

Jerod, Feross, and Nick discuss the latest npm security fiasco, opine on the strengths and weaknesses of spreadsheets, explain CORS like they’re 5 (sorta), and give shout outs to deserving purveyors of fine software.

Jon, Mat, Johnny, and special guest Cory LaNou discuss the ins and outs of structuring Go programs. Why is app structure so important? Why is it hard to structure Go apps? What happens if we get it wrong? Why do we confuse folder structures with application design? How should a new Go app be structured?

Christine Yen (co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb) joined the show to talk about her upcoming talk at Strange Loop titled “Observability: Superpowers for Developers.” We talk practically about observability and how it delivers on these superpowers. We also cover the biggest hurdles to observability, the cultural shifts needed in teams to implement observability, and even the gains the entire organization can enjoy when you deliver high-quality code and you’re able to respond to system failure with resilience.

In this inaugural episode, Mireille and Adam explore what it means to be human at the most basic level. Our goal is to explore the inner-workings of the human brain to better understand our humanity. What are we capable of? What are the common experiences of life we all share? We start by asking the question, “what are the fundamentals of being human?”

Jon, Mark, Johnny, and special guest Jamal Yusuf discuss what to expect when attending a conference like GopherCon. What should you be doing before you attend GopherCon? What should you bring to the conference? What shouldn’t you bring? What are the training sessions about? What about the hacking sessions and talking with the Go team? What if you don’t know anyone?

We’re trying a brand new segment called YepNope, wherein your intrepid panelists engage in a lively debate around a premise. In this debate, Feross and KBall argue that websites should work without requiring JS and Divya and Chris say, “Nah!”

Please let us know if you like this style episode! We had fun recording it, but that doesn’t matter much if y’all don’t enjoy listening to it.

We’re joined by C J Silverio, aka ceejbot on Twitter, aka 2nd hire and former CTO at npm Inc. We talk with Ceej about her recent JS Conf EU talk titled “The Economies of Open Source” where she laid our her concerns with the JavaScript language commons being owned by venture capitalists. Currently the JavaScript language commons is controlled by the npm registery, and as you may know, npm is a VC backed for profit start up. Of course we also talk with Ceej about the bomb she dropped, Entropic, at the end of that talk — a federated package registry for JavaScript C J hopes will unseat npm and free the JavaScript language commons.

Chris and Daniel take the opportunity to catch up on some recent AI news. Among other things, they discuss the increasing impact of AI on studies of the ancient world and “good” uses of GANs. They also provide some more learning resources to help you level up your AI and machine learning game.

KBall and Nick sync up with Node.js core contributor Ujjwal Sharma to dive deep into how to get into the world of open source software.